The Experience of Exiliance in Autofictional Writing

Sylvia Molloy, a Post-Exilic Avant la Lettre

Abstract

This article examines how autofiction in a post-exilic mode operates as a performative device for the production of a plural and mobile subjectivity. Unlike traditional migrant literature of a binary cast — centered on the anguish of expatriation and territorial or cultural loss — post-exilic literature negotiates and inhabits new forms of ontological foreignness. Within this framework, identity origin ceases to function as a fixed reference and becomes an unstable, reconfigurable element within the very act of writing. The emphasis shifts from a lack of rootedness toward the appropriation and agentive embrace of diversity. From this standpoint, the article analyzes how three works by Sylvia Molloy engage with the mediations, multiplicities, and discontinuities bound up with the phenomenon of exiliance. It further explores how an authorial figure takes shape whose praxis not only overflows hegemonic linguistic, geographical, and cultural structures, but also produces new relational and dissident cartographies. This perspective distances itself from classical cosmopolitanism — understood as the transcendence of nationalist canons — in order to think through a modality of being and creating traversed by mobility, tension, and decentering; a modality that is crucial in a context marked by the persistence of discourses of closure, homogenization, and identitarian retreat.